(Clip) Having A Low Estimation Of Yourself

Can I give you an example? I've got to wind this down. In those meetings that I talked about when we were in the Thousand Islands with Leonard Ravenhill and his family, he was asked to speak by the owner of the castle, whose name I won't give you. It was a Sunday morning. They invited people from all around there, rich people mostly, and the speaker, I mean the moderator, the introducer, said when he introduced Leonard Ravenhill, he said, and we're so privileged this morning to have one of the three greatest speakers in America. And I knew Len well enough to know that that wasn't going to sit real well with him. He didn't say anything. He got up and spoke. As soon as the service was ended, I was sitting on this side right over there on the end in the meeting room. He came straight down from the platform. He came straight up to me and looked me in the eye. He had an unusual way of saying Doug. He didn't say Doug the way I do. It was almost duck, not quite. He had just a slight English touch to it, and he said, Doug, did you hear that introduction this morning? I said, yes, brother. I was in my early 20s. Yes, brother, I heard what he said. He said to me, did you ever hear such verbal vomit in your life? That was worth a thousand sermons to me on humility. He was impervious to flattery. He didn't have a high opinion of himself. You might be surprised, although I hope not, by this enduring maxim found in the first chapter of Madame Guyon's autobiography in French, Guillaume. Maybe you know that name. Leonard Daniel gave me my first copy. They never told me about Madame Guillaume in Bible College. She said, if you are fully convinced that it is on the nothing in man that God establishes his greatest works, you may be guarded against disappointment or surprise. The nothing in man. What do you say to yourself about yourself? The words form in you almost unconsciously. You think about what you think you are. Never going to answer, isn't this great pavilion that I built? You're going to eat like an ox grass for a while until what you think about yourself is destroyed. Diotrephes, third John, who loves to have the preeminence among you. That's what he thought about himself. I'm the first. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the negative effect that your self-assessments have on you unless they are shaped by God himself.